Talon, to continue the hijack, the point remains, the disciples were jewish. All of them. All twelve. And Judas. Jewish people. John the Baptist? Jewish. Paul? Jewish. Mary? Jewish. Joseph? Jewish. “King of the Jews”, remember?
http://www.amfi.org/antisemit.htm
Christian site, pointing out that the disciples were jewish. It’s a bit hard to find a cite, as it’s so, uhm, blatantly known. What did you think they were, followers of Mithra?
Silly me. I would have expected Gameramadan.
Oh, and E-Sabbath?
That would be Mothra.
Hm. Many small jewish men, singing, as Jesus on a Cross flies into view, shedding holy blood. He corkscrews, using his crown of thorns as an auger to dig into Godzilla’s side.
I’d pay to see that.
Banning discussion is anti-educational. Banning prayer should be a no-brainer. Would the school bus the kids to the nearest mosque and teach Islam to the kids who were interested? Would they do it as part of an “educational” program? Feh.
I haven’t read all of this thread, but I disagree with the school doing this. Why? Because I grew up in rural Virginia. When I was in third grade, my family moved me to a new elementary school in a very small community. Once a week in our classes, we’d be put on the bus and taken down to the nearby Methodist church for Bible stories. I had already started developing a mistrust of religion by then, and this seemed to be incredibly pushy to me. If you opted out of the class, there wasn’t anything to do back at school, and the few times I did stay back, my classmates teased me. I also got a ‘why wouldn’t you want to go’ reaction from my teachers, which confused me. I knew I wasn’t a bad person for not going, but I looked up to my teachers, and the subtle differences in treatment when I opted out was upsetting to me as a child.
I was in high school when VA instituted that moment of silence for ‘prayer, meditation or quiet reflection’ crap, too. Kids who didn’t agree with it and protested were disciplined. :mad:
If that’s your understanding of Christianity, then it’s a good thing you dropped it.
I wish all the people who took such a simple-minded view of religion and ethics would stop calling themselves Christians; it would make it a lot easier for those of us who do get what it’s really all about.
You know perfectly well my understanding of the history of Christianity, and you also know well that the message of liberation Jesus taught has been drowned out by legalism and fearmongering.
Stop being so defensive and just admit that your religion has been hijacked by Pharisees. We know you’re a good guy and that there are many good people who are Christian, but they aren’t running the churches.
A lot of folks in the thread here have expressed opinions about the constitutionality of this case. I have found that the Supreme Court has explicitly allowed such released time programs if they are voluntary and no public money is spent on religious instruction.
The case was Zorach v. Clauson, decided in 1952.
I especially liked the part where Justice William O. Douglas labeled as extreme views toward public faith routinely displayed on this board. I’ll have to remember that one for the future.
I realized immediately after I posted that it was going to come across as just petty one-upmanship, but the impetus behind it was genuine – I keep thinking that I do know perfectly well your stance on Christianity, and then I read something from you like the bit I quoted. We’ve gone back and forth on this plenty of times before, and I think I’ve got an understanding where you’re coming from and I believe we’re headed to the same place, just through different paths. But the thing I absolutely do not agree with is the statement that my religion has been “hijacked,” that the people who are subverting and corrupting my religion have already won.
A somewhat personally shameful anecdote.
When I was about eleven, I met a Jewish girl. I was not exactly religiously savvy; I’d gone to pretty reasonable Lutheran churches my whole life. I’d heard of Jews but didn’t really know what being Jewish meant, and Christian had always been connoted ‘good’. So the girl mentions that she is Jewish. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I was surprised to learn that Jews were not Christian.
Heheh.
Now, I was again not religiously savvy. My parents were/are liberal. I learned a great deal starting at that point. I did not have any belief that Jews were bad or anything of that nature. But Christian = Good in my eleven year old mind, and what this little girl said sounds like something I might have said.
YMMV, naturally. But I was a pretty smart kid. I’d known children from all manner of cultures; I wasn’t restricted to only WASPs. I was somewhat culturally aware, just not very good at making connections.
Thanks, LPN. I think that pretty much addresses the point I was making. I think it’s a big stretch to go from the observation that some church-going kiddies are not well versed in comparative religion and the awareness that there are extremely good people to be found in pretty much any religion you care to name, to “Eek, the fundies are bringing up their children to be Jew-haters! Just as I’ve been saying all along! The sky is falling, we must go and see the king!”.
The sad part is, in the main I find gobear intelligent, informed, articulate and witty. 
Malacandra, I emphatically do not believe that all fundamentalists hate Jews, or are raising their kids to hate Jews. Neither should you state that none are doing so.
An important thing you and I seem differ on: how much of a connection there is between religious training and prejudice.
You seem to believe it’s smaller than I do.
We are both products of our experiences, and will have a very hard time ‘proving’ either view.
The focus of this thread has been fundamentalist Christians, but I don’t mean to single them out, because I think it’s part of a bigger phenomenon.
Specifically, cultural isolation.
FTR, one of the most vicious anti-semites I ever knew was a devout Catholic (he got to meet the Pope when he came here in 1996). He was my boss’s boss, and he apparently had assumed I was Italian (which nationality my last name is often mistaken for). He expressed to me some opinions on Jews that would have made Mark Fuhrman proud – his hopes included “piling them up and setting them on fire”. Interestingly, this guy wasn’t too crazy about Protestants either – he cried on my shoulder when his son wanted to marry a Baptist girl that he’d met at college in the south. After my promotion came through, I finally had to let him know that I didn’t share his faith – or his prejudices – by telling him, “G., I wouldn’t worry about it. My brother married a Catholic girl, and they’re doing fine”. 
I later learned that this guy had grown up in a big-city neighborhood where everybody was Italian.
I believe that one thing that can lead to religious/ethnic/cultural intolerance is never having contact with anyone who doesn’t share your religion/ethnicity/culture, especially during your childhood.
This can happen out in small towns in the red states, and it can happen in urban neighborhoods. It can happen anywhere in the world – do you think fundamentalist Muslims in the Middle East who think we are the ‘Great Satan’ have had much contact with Americans?
I here defer to Liberal’s frequent advice, originated by Jesus: *love your neighbor as yourself. *
I like this advice a lot.
If I believed there was a God, I would second the admonition to love Him just as much.
Aheheheh. I went to a rural high school, and recall culturally isolated friends’ astonishment when they learned that Muslims didn’t celebrate Christmas and Jews worshipped in synagogues. (“So you’re having the bat mitzvah at the syg…syn…Jewish church, eh?” I kid not.) Our longtime computer teacher, a devout man who often gave sermons at his Gospel Hall, thought that Jews still sacrificed animals for atonement, just as described in Leviticus. :smack:
Then there were the schoolkids, led by the brother of one of abovesaid friends, who ran after a boy from the other Jewish family in town, calling him “dirty Jew”. And my friend who went around saying that Islam was a cult, something she had apparently learned at her youth group.
In my old neighborhood we had Italians, Irish, Catholics, Protestants of various types, and Jews. To all of us, as kids, it was a non-issue. When did everything change so drastically?
SteveG1, maybe the reason it was a non-issue for you is that your neighborhood had all those different people living in it?
The teacher sounded like she wanted to build tolerance for Judaism by pointing out that Jesus was jewish. It was the little girl who said ‘but he was a good person’, not the teacher. If the teacher had said it it’d be different.
I think you may be conflating the two points that this thread has broken into: the propriety/constitutionality of using public funds to teach Bible classes; and whether the little girl has been taught that Jews are bad.
I agree that it would be worse if the teacher had conveyed anti-semitism to the students, but I think that people raising their kids that way is not a good thing, especially if they call themselves Christians.
(And I acknowledge that we don’t all agree on whether the girl has in fact been taught anti-semitism by anyone).
Taking the position of devil’s advocate, isn’t it possible that the little girl meant “but He was a good person” in the sense of “but [notwithstanding any other consideration, such as whether He was a Jew or Gentile, it nevertheless remains that His chief identifying characteristic is that] He was a good person.”?
For a second grader? I doubt it.
When I was in second grade, you had good people, and you had bad people. You wouldn’t say, “But it doesn’t matter that he was a (Jew/Christian/Muslim/Trekkie/)”
Now, that’s not to say that I believed Jews were bad people-they weren’t, they were just, well, Jewish. They were just people, who believed something different. (And wrong, I thought at the time, but I also never thought they’d go to Hell-Hell was for BAD PEOPLE.)
Kids at that age aren’t really up to that kind of logic yet, Liberal.
In second grade, I thought Jehovah’s Witnesses worshipped a frog. I didn’t think they were bad, though.